Yikes

Last Thursday night, our boy's basketball team finished out their "home" basketball schedule, thus ending my 3-year run of holding my post at the southeast corner of the gym as a supervisor. It wasn't a bad gig -- watching free boys basketball from three different seasons and I even got paid for it!

But with this supervision job, I came to observe many things at my post.

It all came to a head for me for their last two home games, in which the quality of the play was so absolutely horrible that I walked off in frustration and anger. It's even surpring that our P-Town boys even won these games!

The main focus of my frustration is the lack of fan support, especially from the student section. It's all fine-and-dandy that if they want to sit front row, pack the opposite side of the gym (from the benches) and occasionally do a cheer along with the cheerleaders. Other than that, they're bumps on a log.

Back in my day, I didn't play basketball. But I can tell you this, we were FANS -- home or away. Mike was the ballplayer from our core group of guys we used to hang out with; so Robb, Sean, myself, and a couple of choice females would hold court -- front row-center and bringing it. Our high school's own head coach would even hear our barbs from across the gym!

It's part of the atmosphere ... the game itself! We would rip on anybody who came close to us, especially during in-bounds passes when we would be relenting towards the opposition. But unfortunately for where I teach, our own students are put down by a crusty old athletic director, a person who's outlived the dinosaurs. When any of our students would start to raise a ruckus towards the other team, he would slowly move over to the student section and put out that fire before it even started with a threat of kicking them out of the gym for the entire school year.

Case in point: one of our students just showed up in a gorilla mask. Could he wear it? Nope. Could the students dress up in all-white clothing to create a "white-out" effect? Nope. Shot down.

I remember a coaches' meeting we had earlier in the school year about our crowds. We were all disappointed, but we did not blame the students for that. They are now basically "programmed" to cheer in a certain way: not at all.

I'm surprised they can even clap at all. Man, times change.